In the News

TORONTO -- The producers of Hairspray announced yesterday that the final curtain for the Toronto production of the Broadway hit will fall in eight weeks, making it the latest long-run musical cut short by disappointing ticket sales.

A big, home-grown production of a major show like Hairspray, which has a particularly large cast and elaborate sets, usually needs to run between 25 and 52 weeks with a packed audience to break even, said theatre impresario David Mirvish.

With banners advertising the musical strewn throughout the city, Mirvish Productions had been looking for Hairspray to play for at least a year after it opened in early April.

Instead, despite receiving good reviews, it will have been performed for 33 weeks (or just 264 shows) by the time it closes at the end of November. This is similar to the fate of the Toronto production of The Producers, which closed in September after only nine months (or 331 performances).

With its run cut short, Mirvish said that the show's various investors will lose money, although he wouldn't disclose how much specifically. In late September, Hairspray was taking in about $700,000 a week at the box office, as opposed to roughly $850,000 in mid-August, according to numbers provided by producers to the trade paper Variety. The highest possible box office, with no discounted seats, is closer to $950,000.

There's a hope that attendance for the final eight weeks and the sale of sets and props to other productions, such as the upcoming staging of the musical in London, will help cushion the financial blow. In addition to its long run on Broadway, there's also a touring production of Hairspray in the United States, and it will open in London in about a year from now.

"If you look at American tourism over the summer, it went between 10 and 25 per cent of our audience this year. And the difference was made up by people in Ontario who came to the city," Mirvish said. American audiences usually comprise 50 to 60 per cent of the summer audience.

Because ticket sales to people from the Toronto area are still encouraging, Hairspray will run until Nov. 28 to capture more of that local audience.

"We're willing to gamble that [over] the next eight weeks, there will be an audience that will fill this theatre."

Part of the problem facing large productions like this, Mirvish indicated, is that Toronto producers have to either stage short-run shows or gamble on long-run hits. Travel rules make bringing a musical to Canada and staging it for a medium-length run over a few months uneconomical.

"We have a very good structure for doing shows for seven weeks. And we have a very good structure for mega-hits that will run a year or more. We do not have a structure for dealing with shows that are maybe 20 weeks here [in Toronto] and then a year's tour in North America," Mirvish said. "So we have to gamble that a show is either a seven-week one or a year one, and we haven't any system for dealing with one that's in-between."

The question, given disappointing ticket sales, is whether the days of long runs of more than a year are dwindling in Toronto, and medium-length runs over a few months will become more the norm.